Future Garage Parties
Hi y'all,
- No new writing for the blog this week, I didn't have the cycles. But because I'm still in the middle of finishing the new garage, it feels like a good time to resurface the piece I wrote when I first started thinking about this work - the second garage. It's supposed to be about how expectations play on the creative process (or that was the goal - you tell me if I hit it or was way off). Seven months later I'm insulating and hanging maple-sided plywood in hundred-degree heat, which is a pretty stupid way to learn that the answer to the question I posed was just to start. Either way, the work has me excited to host a bunch of you once it's done. The last garage was known for its parties, and this one is being built with them in mind as well.
- Two videos about cutting things that I watched back to back and haven't stopped thinking about. The first is Trey Parker and Matt Stone on story structure - four minutes, one rule: the beats of a story should be joined by "but" or "therefore," never "and then." Once you hear it you can't unhear it, and you'll start diagnosing every movie you watch. The second is CinemaStix deleting 80% of Spider-Man 3 and recutting what's left into an episode of The Twilight Zone. The wild part is it works. Same lesson from opposite ends - one is about what to build, the other is about what to throw away.
- I found Bingebuster on Reddit and love it. It takes movies actually available on your streaming services and rebuilds them into a 3D video store you can walk around. Real covers on real shelves, sorted by genre. It's a gimmick and I don't care - what I miss about a video store is the finite selection. A wall you could reach the end of, which made picking something feel like a decision instead of a scroll. This gets a little of that back.
- Learned this week that last Saturday was the tenth World Dog Surfing Championships in Pacifica. It produced an all-time local news segment, the kind of thing Ron Burgundy would have covered, and photos that are extremely worth your time. We found out a few weeks ago that Nora can swim, so now we have to find out if she can hang ten.
- Finished Five Decembers by James Kestrel and loved it. A couple weeks ago I flagged it as out of left field for me, and it ended up being the best thing I've read all summer. It's a murder case that opens in Honolulu in the weeks before Pearl Harbor and then gets swallowed whole by the war, and it's constructed like a film - you can feel the cuts. I want an adaptation, and I want it stylized: grainy, sepia, everything in shadow. What's stayed with me is the melancholy of it. Longing and loss and regret sit under every page, and then it gets punctuated by sudden violence and all the ordinary awfulness that war makes room for.
- Side note: I hate finishing a book late at night, which is exactly what I did with this one. Closing the last page feels a little like saying goodbye to a friend you won't see for a long time. Falling asleep right after is difficult. I always have to go grab something light and read a few pages just to shake it off.
- Music this week is This is Lorelei - "Oh No Now My" (Spotify, Apple). Nate Amos has been on a tear the last couple years. He writes these things that sound like a lost 70s AM radio single someone recorded onto a four-track in a basement, and this one has the best kind of chorus - the sort you're humming before you've decided whether you like the song. It's the first single off The Singer in My Band, out September 11 on Matador. The video's very cool stop motion and worth watching too.
Joey
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